Ahmed Kathrada’s death a great loss to South Africa

Struggle veteran Ahmed Kathrada, who died in Johannesburg in the early hours of Tuesday morning, lived a more than full life in politics and encapsulated US president Theodore Roosevelt’s dictum: “speak quietly but carry a big stick”.

Born in the backwater of Schweizer-Reneke in what was then the Western Transvaal, he went into anti-regime politics at 17, eschewing the desires of his parents that he follow a medical career – a path not open to most citizens who did not fall into the narrow grouping of white in those days.

Always quietly spoken and gentlemanly to the extreme, the placid exterior hid a steel core that not even the iconoclastic restrictions of apartheid could bend. This, as well as his demeanour, endeared him to almost everyone he came into contact with.

Not even Kathrada’s 26 long years of imprisonment – on Robben Island and latterly in Pollsmoor Prison before his release in 1989 – would alter his inherent gentlemanly bearing.

He counted his close friendship with fellow Robben Islander Nelson Mandela as being hugely important to him during his internment and, like Madiba, had both a low-key sense of humour and a strong affinity to his fellow human beings. This country has lost a great South African.

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